George Gallup’s polling marked the film industry’s first full-scale effort at empirical market research, says Susan Ohmer, an assistant professor of modern communication at the University of Notre Dame and author of George Gallup in Hollywood (Columbia University Press). It promised to surpass what could be gleaned from fan mail, industry journalism, or even the personal observations of moguls, such as Adolph Zukor, who liked to sit in theaters and turn around to stare at filmgoers.

Before discussing Gallup’s creation of the Audience Research Institute, Ms. Ohmer sets the stage by detailing his master’s and doctoral research in psychology at the University of Iowa, his advertising work, and the polling that would make him a household name with the presidential election of 1936.

By the start of the ARI, the pollster had already begun sprinkling questions about stars and frequency of filmgoing in polls about Roosevelt and political issues. As Ms. Ohmer shows, he was building the first demographic picture of the American film audience. She also details initial polls he conducted on the popularity of single versus double features and on color filmmaking.

Eventually Gallup won an exclusive contract with RKO Pictures to test the popularity of actors, proposed story lines, and even titles. His chief colleague was David Ogilvy, later one of the most famous advertising men in America. Until he left the ARI in late 42, the British-born Ogilvy was the often acerbic voice of Gallup results for RKO, allowing his preferences to color the numbers. For example, while the pollsters identified lower-income filmgoers as a boon to the industry, Ogilvy could be dismissive of those same audiences, referring to “nether segments” who loved Abbott and Costello, and “proletarian admirers” of George Raft.

Ms. Ohmer goes on to describe Gallup’s work with two independent producers, Selznick and Walt Disney, and also details the views of critics of Hollywood market research who charged that surveys stifled innovation. Filmmaking had become “a sterile, glutted and intractable thing,” one fumed. However, Gallup’s approach would endure, even as the pollster’s reputation was clouded by a stunningly wrong prediction in politicsDewey over Truman in 1948.

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Captured in the woods near the German town of Hamelin, Peter of Hanover was one of several feral children whose stories gripped the imagination of the Enlightenment.

His quadrupedal posture and liking for roots, nuts, and berries suggested an ursine upbringing to some. Whether bearish or just boorish, the mute and uncouth youth was sent, in 1726, to be a guest of England’s German-born Hanover court. There, notes Julia V. Douthwaite, he became a “political foil” for court critics, who charged that exposure to the court would corrupt “wild Peter,” not improve him. Peter too played into debates over “natural man” and human-animal differences. But efforts to educate him largely failed.

It was another wild, and highly carnivorous, child, Marie-Angelique LeBlanc, who became far more acculturated. Seized in France in 1731, she was confined to a convent and her “progress” charted in terms of docility, change of bloody eating habits, and penitence. “The writer Louis Racine, for example, read the wild girl’s past as a moral flaw,” says Ms. Douthwaite, “a vestige of original sin.”

The feral tales of Marie, Peter, and Victor de l’Aveyron open “The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment” (University of Chicago Press). The author uses a range of texts, from child-rearing manuals to Sade’s darkest fantasies, to explore Enlightenment notions of mankind as an “infinitely malleable entity, for better or for worse.” The era’s literature, she writes, built on an intimate knowledge of period science, a realm that embraced amateur experimentalism. “Writers in all literary genres were very interested in the testing of human limitsboth physical and moral,” says the scholar, a professor of French at theUniversity of Notre Dame.

Moving from wild children to “thought experiments,” she discusses scientists who speculated on Adamic figures or statues come to life. Human plasticity was also explored, notably in Rousseau’s novel-treatise Emile, ou de l’education. Ms. Douthwaite shows how his sometimes kind, sometimes cruel plans for the fictional boy were disastrously replicated in the real-life experiments of three “notorious parent-pedagogues”Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Thomas Day, and Manon Roland.

From parents run amok to nations in turmoil, she traces ideas of human perfectibility in the notion of the “regenerated man” in revolutionary France. Later, Sade’s Justine and other dystopian fiction “symbolize the dangers of science and politics in the postrevolutionary age.”

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